In a Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) storage system, data from a file is stored in blocks distributed across different disk drives. A strip comprises a number of sequentially addressed blocks written to one of the disks and a strip size comprises the number of blocks of data in a strip. The set of strips of sequentially addressed blocks that are written across the disk drives are referred to as a stripe. A RAID controller stripes the data across the disks configured as RAID devices and calculates a parity, or checksum, value that is written to one disk. The parity data may alternatively be striped or interleaved through the user data on the multiple disks. With parity, if one or more disks fail, the data on the failed disk(s) may be recovered using an algorithm that combines the parity data and the data on the surviving disks to rebuild the data on the failed disk(s). Further details on RAID technology are described in the publication “A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) by D. A. Patterson et al., Ass'n of Computing Machinery, Proceedings of the SIGMOD, pgs. 109-116 (1988).